Surfing the web while using either Microsoft Edge or Internet Explorer 11 on Windows 10 should be a bit safer, thanks to some improvements Microsoft has made to its SmartScreen malicious website protection system. The company revealed that the latest updates for Windows 10 now offer better protection against 'drive-by attacks' from malicious websites.

What is a drive-by attack? Microsoft says:

"Drive-by attacks are malicious web attacks that tend to start on trusted websites, targeting security vulnerabilities in commonly used software. What's more, they often don't require any user interaction – so there's nothing to click, nothing to download – and infection is usually invisible."

Microsoft has gathered information on how these attacks are made via data from Microsoft Edge, Internet Explorer, Bing, Defender and others. This information is added to the SmartScreen protection system:

"Unlike existing SmartScreen protection from socially engineered attacks, drive-by attacks need to be detected and prevented before any web content is parsed and rendered. To avoid impacting browsing performance, SmartScreen helps protect against drive-by attacks by using a small cache file created by the SmartScreen service. This cache file is periodically updated by your browser to help keep you protected and to ensure that calls to the SmartScreen service are only made if we believe there's a high probability of malicious content on a page."

They're probably working on making life easy for developers to port extensions from Chrome or Firefox. If they don't do that then Edge's store will meet a fate similar to that of WP today - the dreaded app gap.

The header image shows a mis-zoomed page...does that mean there's malicious stuff going on? This happens to me often, but mostly with dual screens (on a sp3 w/docking station) not to mention what seems to be super-sleep (closing all programs) when attached to the dock.

Isn't part of marketing, once you have peoples attention in this day and age, introduce a feature rich environment, keep them there and surprise them with new innovating features so they stay.

What they have done over and over again especially lately..everything seems unfinished..everything is "we're working on it, but don't forget to buy our latest hardware". If it was Google, fine, it's not like they're lacking in the feature department or market shares. Microsoft got us, the nerd click, and the rest of the folks that more then likely rock an iPhone 5-6 or a Samsung and have a PC á la maison. So they're into Firefox, chrome or whatever, with extension support. 6 months later and Microsoft has given us hover over tab...now if you mouse is over the tab and your ignorant behind is lazy enough to not be able to click on the tab to just check where you are, to not forget the already written text on the tab..then I mean, Edge is for you.

The internet is what it is, and you can barely surf the web without a page having multiple layers of ads, Trojans and what have you..so a simple click on an article opens another ad-tab...distraction..or a new window, and just when you're clicking to close it, it pops behind the existing window and one closes it..distraction. Folks that aren't nerds and look for for solutions or workarounds leave it and don't look back coz most of the folks, nowadays, have the expansion span of a teenager and there's always something better on the horizon. Microsoft's shortcomings ~ starting to become a drag.

Soccer mom does not use browser extensions. Bar password plugins (which I can see a geniune desirability for) extension are the domain of nerds. You can manually add an ad block hosts file - but thats not in the spirit of free Internet where ad impressions are paying for people like Daniel of WP central to write the articles you come here to post whines under. This is another case of massive whining, and overstating how "bad people" MS are, when its a minority sport, for a world where browsers should not be encumbered by Flash, or any other need for additional software, just an open standard layout language like HTML5. If you are so disgruntled, go get a Mac, then go whine over at Mac Central about how few of your games are available, or you many missing enterprise apps. Stop looking at the world through this childish / selfish POV and then droning on about MS sucking. I am personally loving my Xbox, my Lumia, Windows 10, OneDrive, OneNote and many other excellent MS products. I've also got products from other companies, with good parts and bad parts. This is how the world is, there is no thing as perfection, just "best fit" for ones needs. Choose, don't whine.